Armenia

The Armenian Flag

I have lived in Armenia for the past two years (2018-2020) where I have finished my IB diploma at an international school. When I first came to Armenia, it felt similar to my home in Palestine since they were both countries with generally poor populations, however, by the time I had to leave, I felt that the economic situation in the country has improved through advancement I noticed in the city I lived in and in the capital, and through the talk of my Armenian friends. Although I felt the change, I had no objective evidence for its existence outside the city I lived in -or at all- so I decided to investigate it here.

Please note that all graphs are interactive and hovering over data points shows precise values at that point.

Happiness and Anger

In 2019, Armenians were labeled as the angriest in the world in a Gallup survey with %45 of their population expressing feeling a lot of anger in the previous day (McCarthy). This got me thinking about the well-being and the happiness of the population since I imagine that a psychologically distressed population would have a hard time achieving a noticeable positive change in a short time. Therefore, I searched for the happiness score of Armenia, and it seemed to be moving in a positive direction:

We can see that during the past few years starting from 2017, there has been a relatively high increase in the happiness index compared to the prior years. This increase of nearly 1 point in happiness scale raised Armenia from being the 128th happiest to the 86th happiest country in the world in only two years (“World Happiness Index - Knoema.Com”).

These conflicting messages suggest that, while Armenians might be angry on day-to-day basis, they are making rapid progress in terms of happiness and satisfaction. The data above support this hypothesis in addition to the information provided to me by my Armenian friends that describe the betterment of their country on multiple dimensions in the past few years.

The natural question to ask was “what are the factors that are contributing to the increased satisfaction in Armenia?” Two possible hypotheses to mind: Increased satisfaction due to economic growth (long-term), and increased satisfaction after the 2018 revolution that resulted in overthrowing the older government and the establishment of a new one (short-term). I will explore both hypotheses here.

Economic growth?

GDP

To explore economic growth I will start by looking at GDP (constant 2010 US$) using the information provided by the World Bank data repository which provides information about global development:

The graph shows increasing GDP since the year 2000, and to understand this increase better, I examined the annual GDP growth rate that helps us understand the health of the economy and measure the effects events that take place in a given year like the 2008 global recession or the rise of the pandemic in 2020 on the economy.

We see that GDP has been increasing at a very high rate, often exceeding 10% since the year 2000 until 2009 when it dropped by 14% which, according to this report by the Asian Development Bank, was due to the 2008-2009 crises that “exposed the vulnerabilities of the Armenian economy, when foreign exchange inflows […] declined sharply.” However, Armenia was able to return to a high growth rate and achieve an increase in GDP since then and was as high as 7.5% in 2019.

While an increase in GDP is often desirable, it can also lead to negative consequences on the economy. To examine whether this increase was beneficial to the economy, one factor we can look at is the poverty rate and whether this increase in GDP was accompanied by a decrease in poverty or had negative or no effect.

Poverty

When examining the poverty rate defined as $3.20/day, we find that it has been dropping since the beginning of this Millennium, going down from over 47% in 2001 to around 10% in 2019.

We find that, indeed, the increase in GDP was accompanied by a decrease in poverty, since GDP growth leading to 2009 witnessed a similar but decreasing trend in the poverty rate, GDP’s decline in 2009 was accompanied by an increase in poverty, and the rising GDP in the years that followed had GDP increasing with poverty decreasing as well. The increase in GDP and the decrease in poverty could be two of the factors leading to increased satisfaction in the long term.

Tourism and the Economy

dilijan This is a photo of Dilijan, the city where I lived (source).

One element that is greatly contributing to the economy of Armenia is tourism, and that is due to its remarkable nature and the fact that many Armenians speak Russian, making it a popular destination for people from Caucasus and Russian-speaking nations. I decided to examine this sector of the economy for any changes in the last few years and observe its trends.

To find information about tourism in Armenia, I looked for data sets online and found this data set on Knoema that provided information from 2008 untill 2019. Using the number of arriving tourists from this data as a rough indicator of the development of the sector, we find a that the numbers has neary quadrupled from around 500,000 in 2008 to 1,900,000 tourists in 2019.

To understand the effect of the tourists quantitatively, I wanted to compare the revenue generated through tourism throughout these years. WorldData.info provided information about the average revenue generated from each tourist. After scraping this data, I calculated total revenue by multiplying the number of tourists by the average revenue generated by each one.

The following plot showcases the revenue generated by tourism in Armenia:

The increase in the number of tourists has le to a huge increase in revenues in the tourism sphere in the past years. Armenia is now generating over 1.5 Billion dollars in revenue compared to 560 million dollars generated in 2008.ed in 2008.

Safety

Aside from economic flourishing wich migh be contributing to the increase in happiness of the citizens, Armenia has been witnessing a decrease in intentional homicide rates which started dropping after the early 1990s. This is significant to our happiness analysis because a kid born in the year 2000 is now 21, and has lived a childhood in a relatively safer environment -and who is now contributing to the studies that measure happiness.

Political Situation

The previously explored factors could explain the long-term effect on the Armenian society, however, to try and explain the recent increase in satisfaction starting from 2018, I would like to explore the political situation of Armenia and how it changed after the 2018 revolution.

The data in the following section comes from the USAID website which provides thousands of indicators about countries around the world and allows users to download the data for free.

According to the data provided by the USAID, we see that there has been changes to the ranking of Armenia on the World Press Freedom Index after the revolution as shown by the following graph:

We see that directly after the revolution, Armenia went from being the 80th country with the most press freedom in 2018 to the 61st in 2019, rising by more than 20 ranks in one year. Furthermore, the data shows us that this increase in press freedom was accompanied by an increase in the Civil Liberties and Political Rights Score (out of 100) directly after the revolution and has increased again in 2020:

However, it should be noted that Armenia has experienced similar ranking before in 2003 and 2004 as shown by the graph.

These changes after the revolution, in addition to the ripple effect that they have on society, could possibly explain the increase in happiness score in Armenia that has occured occurred recently.